THE QUAKING OF THE EARTH
With the opening of the books of enlistment the whole county caught
fire. When the people met at the old Petworth Church on Sundays there
was nothing but talk of the coming war. The sermons of Mr. Brand, the
rector, were one long war cry against the Yankees and exhortations to
go forth and fight to the death in the great cause of States’ Rights.
The clergyman was remorselessly badgered by Mrs. Charteris, who had
extorted from him the secret of his age, which was considerably over
forty-five. Dr. Yelverton, who, in spite of his sixty-five years,
thought Mrs. Charteris, who was not yet forty years old, none too young
for him, immediately grew in favor with the lady. Mrs. Charteris had
played them off one against the other with consummate skill for fifteen
years. But when the trumpet of war resounded and Mr. Brand elected to
stay at home, while Dr. Yelverton, examining himself as a surgeon,
pronounced himself entirely fit for duty in the army, he at once gained
a tremendous lead in the lady’s favor.
George Charteris, the only son of his mother, was at school near
Baltimore, but by command of Mrs. Charteris he was to make straight for
Greenhill as soon as Virginia should secede.
All the boys in the county of Archie Tremaine’s and George Charteris’s
age were burning to enlist and formed companies of their own, studying
and drilling with the utmost ardor. The interest in events was not
confined to the white people. The negroes, knowing that the whole
future of their race depended upon the issue of the coming struggle,
took a feverish, furtive interest in the unfolding of each day’s
happenings and listened slyly to all that was said by the white people.
At night they collected at their quarters and, sitting around in a
ring, listened to what the house servants had to tell them of the
talk that went on at the “gret house.” They were no longer permitted
to visit the different estates freely at night, but were kept as far
as possible from communicating with each other. Lyddon saw this and
trembled for the fate of the women and children to be left defenseless
in the power of the black race, and thought the white people madly
optimistic when they expressed no fear whatever of the negroes in case
of war--a confidence which was nobly sustained when the hour came.
The outward peace was not broken; Lyddon had ever thought lowland
Virginia the most entirely peaceful spot he had ever known in his
life, but the earthquake was at hand. He said this to Angela, who in
Richard’s absence in Richmond attending the convention had come to be
the only person to whom Lyddon could speak his mind freely.
“You have always been restless and yearning for something to happen,”
he said to her one day in the garden as she was snipping dead twigs
off a rose bush. “But you won’t be able to complain of that any more;
stupendous things will happen and that very shortly.”
Angela’s eyes flashed with pleasure. “I don’t mind things happening,”
she said. “I have red blood in me; I don’t like stagnation.” Lyddon,
looking at her, felt pity welling up in his heart; the pity which
maturity, having already suffered, feels for youth--pathetic youth,
which has still to suffer. Whether Angela went with Neville or against
him it would be hard for her. The idea of turning against Neville would
be to her as if the sun rose in the west or water ran uphill. She had
for him a sublimated friendship which was like love and yet was not
love.
The mail came only three times a week and every mail brought long
letters from Richard in Richmond. He told precisely the progress of
events in the convention, the efforts of the Peace Commission, the calm
hearing given to the men who wished Virginia to stay in the Union; but
he never changed his opinion that the State would secede and that the
day of blood was at hand.
Neville’s letters began to be irregular; only two were received from
him in March and one in April. He spoke of others which he had written,
but which had never been received. When Mrs. Tremaine opened these
letters her face always grew pale, and it was paler still when she had
finished reading them and passed them over to Colonel Tremaine. Angela
read hers, too, in silence; she could not be expected to show them to
anyone, but she spoke no word indicating any knowledge of what Neville
meant to do.
Neville’s last letter came the middle of April. Lyddon, who had ridden
to the post office, handed it to Angela in the study. She was sitting
at the window reading, and Lyddon as he came in thought her a charming
picture of youth and happiness. She wore a gown the color of the iris
which was blooming in the box upon the window sill, for Angela claimed
the right to put her flowerpots in the study windows. The April day was
warm and bright, and the sunny air which was wafted in at the window
had in it the intoxication of the spring. Angela’s book evidently
amused her, for she was laughing as she raised her eyes to Lyddon’s
when he held out the letter. Instantly her face clouded. She broke the
seal and read her letter rapidly. But more rapid was the change which
came over her. She sat quite still for a long time looking at the
letter lying in her lap, and then, pale and quiet, rose and passed out
of the room.
Meanwhile the April sky had suddenly clouded, and a few heavy drops
of rain like tears had begun to fall. Lyddon’s heart ached for the
girl. She was different to him from any human being he had ever known.
The simile which so often occurred to him came back with strange
force--that he was a gardener cultivating an exquisite flower for some
one else. He had cultivated already two sturdy trees in Richard and
Neville and a beautiful hardy sapling in Archie, but never before had
he trained a flower in the person of a young girl. Her acquirements,
which would have been nothing in a man, were extraordinary for a woman,
and Lyddon in view of this would have been alarmed for her except that
she understood and practiced housewifery well, was devotedly fond of
music, loved to dance, and like the normal woman made dress a species
of religion. Thus were the sweet femininities maintained.
Lyddon realized one price which Angela had to pay for the training he
had given her--she had no intimate girl friends. She had plenty of girl
companions--Dr. Yelverton’s granddaughters, Colonel Carey’s daughters;
but there was no real community of soul between these young creatures
and Angela. These other girls were satisfied with the quiet country
life in which they dwelt as their mothers and grandmothers had dwelt,
but their ideas of splendor were confined to a larger house and more
servants than they possessed at present and to an annual trip to the
White Sulphur Springs. Not so Angela Vaughn. She longed for palaces
and parks and for the mysterious joys and splendors which she imagined
therein could be found. The Greeks were her soul ancestors, and she had
an adoration for beauty in form, color, and sound. She made Lyddon,
who was quite insensible to music, repeat to her all the details of
the few operas to which he had been dragged and which had bored him to
excess during his European life. Richard’s years in Paris and Neville’s
visits to New York and Saratoga had filled Angela’s girlish heart with
longing, a longing which Mrs. Tremaine thought positively wicked and
the girls of Angela’s acquaintance considered eminently foolish.
Lyddon, in his profession as a trainer of youth, had always reckoned as
a positive detriment any education which segregated a human being from
his fellows. He had reckoned all education which is totally derived
from books as light without warmth. He had good reason for this belief,
his own passion for books having separated him from men in general and
having quenched in him most of the living and vivifying emotions. He
had not been able to quench love, although he had hid it in a sepulcher
and closed the door with a great stone. It was his fate, not having
children of his own, to love the children of others and when he had
grown to love them, they slipped easily from his grasp, except Richard
and Neville Tremaine. But Lyddon believed that he should still hold to
Archie and to that charming child Angela, for he could never reckon
Angela as wholly grown up. There was an eternal simplicity about her,
the frankness of a child in which Lyddon had never perceived any change
from the time she wore pinafores.
Lyddon, thinking these thoughts, stood before the study window watching
the changing April day, alternately fair and stormy. He felt convinced
from Angela’s face on reading her letter that she was struggling with
the great problem of whether she should stand by Neville or abandon
him. Lyddon, whose knowledge of her was acute, and who knew the
generous impulses of her nature, believed she would stand by Neville.
But would she be happy in so doing? Ah, of that he was very far from
certain! No one but Angela and himself knew that she had received a
letter from Neville and the silence maintained about it proved that
the letter contained something painful. At dinner that day Angela sat
silent and constrained until rallied by Archie; she then assumed her
usual air of gayety. In the afternoon she went for a long walk alone
and coming back at twilight paced up and down the garden until Mrs.
Tremaine sent a message out to her that she must come in because the
night was damp and chilly. The long walk at the end of the garden,
where the old wooden bench sat against the wall and the gnarled and
twisted lilacs flourished in green old age, was as much Angela’s beat
as the Ladies’ Walk was Mrs. Tremaine’s. She passed Lyddon on the
stairs as she went up to her room to make ready for supper, and her
face was so wan and woe-begone that Lyddon felt sorry for her. At
supper, however, she appeared in her usual spirits. She had brought
back from her walk in the woods some sprays of the trailing arbutus and
wore them in her shining hair.
The talk as usual was about the coming war. The Richmond newspapers
had been received that day, and Lyddon had got his English newspapers.
Colonel Tremaine inquired about the state of opinion in England
concerning the outbreak of civil war in America, and although Lyddon
was guarded in his replies Colonel Tremaine became irritated by them.
While the brief discussion lasted Lyddon was confirmed in a suspicion
concerning the negroes. They were intently listening and watching all
that went on, and the white family was never left alone. Formerly at
meal times with Hector, Tasso, and Jim Henry to wait it was sometimes
difficult to get any one of them in the room. Tasso and Jim Henry
would be engaged in transporting from the kitchen hot batter cakes,
hot muffins, and all the other varieties of hot bread of which the
formula invariably was, “Take two and butter them while they are hot.”
Meanwhile, Hector would be in the pantry resting himself from the
arduous labors of directing Tasso and Jim Henry. But now one or the
other of the subordinates was always at hand. Lyddon was convinced that
they were the purveyors of news to all the negroes on the plantation.
There was a bell on the back porch, and every one of the twenty-five
servants engaged in the house, the garden, and the stables had a
number. Sometimes Lyddon had known the whole gamut of this bell to be
rung before a single servant appeared on the spot, but now they were
always at hand.
Usually in these discussions of the coming war Angela took a prominent
part. She wished to be like the maidens of Sparta and thought she could
have done the act of Charlotte Corday, and talked enthusiastically of
nursing, like a Sister of Mercy, soldiers in the hospitals. To-night,
however, she seemed not interested in that subject, but willing to talk
on any other. After supper Archie got out his violin and the two played
together as usual. They generally wound up their performances with
“Dixie,” but to-night Angela omitted it. No one noticed this except
Lyddon.
As she took her candle from the hall table she went to the fireplace
and, holding the candle above her head, studied the picture of Penelope
and the Suitors. Seeing Lyddon coming out of the study she turned
quickly and went upstairs. Lyddon, who was a bad sleeper, waked in
the middle of the night and, going to the window to look at the night
sky, saw that candles were still burning in Angela’s room. He lighted
the lamp at his bedside and read an hour and then went again to the
window. Angela’s light was still burning. Lyddon’s heart ached for her.
It was then the middle of April. Two days afterwards when the Richmond
newspapers arrived it was proclaimed that the Federal Government had
called on Virginia for her quota of troops to subdue the seceding
States. This at once forced the issue. The convention then went into
secret session, and the beginning of the crisis was at hand. The
tension of men’s minds grew fiercely acute. Colonel Tremaine no longer
sent to the post office for the letters, but went himself, riding hard
both ways. At any moment now Virginia might be riven from the Union.
Every mail brought a long letter from Richard Tremaine. Any day, any
hour, might bring the great news; but as fate generally wills it the
unexpected happened.
One evening, just as the soft spring night had closed in and the
Harrowby family were assembled in the hall waiting for the announcement
of supper, a sudden wild commotion was heard at the hall door. Archie
ran and opened it. Outside a crowd of negroes were delightedly
welcoming and “howdying” Richard Tremaine. He flung himself off his
horse, ran up the steps, burst into the hall, and waving his hat in the
air cried out in a ringing voice, “Hurrah for States’ Rights! Yesterday
afternoon the deed was done. Virginia is out of the Union forever.” He
clasped his mother with his left arm while he seized his father’s hand,
who said solemnly:
“God save the Commonwealth.”
As soon as the first greetings were over an account was demanded of the
portentous event of the day before, all hanging on Richard’s words.
As he spoke in his clear resonant voice, his countenance full of
animation, Lyddon who stood on the edge of the group fell in love with
his pupil over again. Richard Tremaine had the best sort of masculine
beauty--the beauty of grace, strength and skill. His eyes, a light
penetrating blue, had a lambent fire in them and seemed to illuminate
his speech.
“It was the most solemn scene that could be imagined,” he said. “After
four days of secret session, in which we wrestled together like
gladiators, the striking of the clock told us that the hour had come.
When the presiding officer’s gavel fell and he asked, ‘Shall this
ordinance pass?’ there was not a dry eye in the assemblage. I felt the
tears warm upon my face and was ashamed of my weakness, thinking that
I was acting the boy after all among those graybeards. Then suddenly
I looked up; the presiding officer was in tears and made no secret of
it. The clerk who called the roll, an old man with long white hair,
could not control the trembling of his voice. As each name was spoken I
saw a strange sight, a man unable to give his vote without tears upon
his face. It was the most moving, the most extraordinary sight ever
witnessed in the legislative body. Not a sound was heard except the
calling of the roll and the ‘aye’ or the ‘no’ which answered. There
were fifty-five ‘noes.’ When my name was reached I meant to shout out
the ‘aye’ but I couldn’t; all was too deathlike, too solemn. At last
the final vote was recorded and then it was as if a cable had snapped;
it was like the change from the funeral dirge to the quick step of a
march past. A great shout went up--I found my voice then. I couldn’t
think as wisely as some of those old men, but I could cheer louder
than any of them. I wish I could make you see and feel the solemnity,
the strangeness, the intoxication of that hour. Our vote didn’t take
us into the Confederacy, although it severed us from the Union. We
stood midway between them ready, like Quintus Curtius, to leap into the
abyss. Oh, how great a thing it is to live in this time!”
Lyddon’s eye left for a moment Richard’s eloquent face and traveled
round the hall. At the doors dark faces were peering in. The negroes
were listening breathlessly to that which meant as much to them as to
the race which mastered them.
“As soon as an adjournment was reached,” Richard continued, “I asked
for a week’s leave and got it. I wanted to be the first man in Virginia
to enlist in the army and I believe I can make it. By the way, I hear
from Philip Isabey that he was the first man to enlist in Louisiana and
has been elected captain of the first battery of artillery raised in
the State.”
So far not one word had been spoken of Neville. Richard, looking about
him, suddenly realized this and then in a cool voice asked, “What news
is there from my brother?”
There was a silence for a moment or two and then Colonel Tremaine said
tremulously, “There is no news from your brother.”
At the same moment all became conscious of the peering and listening
negroes. Richard at once said carelessly, “We shall probably see
Neville in a few days. He can easily sail up from Fort Monroe where
he was last week when I had a short note from him brought by private
hand.” Richard took the note out and handed it to his mother. Her hands
trembled a little as she read it. It was brief, merely saying he was
well and had heard good news from home and expecting to be at Harrowby
within the week. Then they trooped into supper. Richard’s story was
not yet half told and he had to answer innumerable questions from
Colonel Tremaine. Mrs. Tremaine sat strangely silent, her brooding eyes
turning toward her right, where at table was Neville’s place. Through
it all Angela, too, remained singularly silent. The reins of discipline
which Mrs. Tremaine had held strictly enough over Neville and Richard
had been relaxed in the case of the Benjamin of her flock and Angela,
the child of her adoption, and they were generally audible as well
as visible. Not so Angela to-night. She sat quiet and Lyddon thought
stunned by what was happening around her.
Archie then brought forth his tale of injuries in not being allowed to
enlist. Richard good-naturedly cuffed him and reminded him that he was
but a baby in years.
After supper was served, Colonel Tremaine called for champagne. A
bottle was fetched by Hector, who took occasion to remark, “Dis heah is
outen de las’ basket. I speck you hav’ to order sum mo’, old Marse.”
“I do not expect to order any more champagne at present,” remarked
Colonel Tremaine grimly.
“And the few bottles which are left,” added Mrs. Tremaine, “must be
saved for the hospitals.”
Colonel Tremaine then rose and all at the table followed his example.
“Let us drink,” he said, “to the cause of the South.” A ringing cheer
which the listening negroes heard burst from Archie as they all drank.
Richard had so much to tell that the family sat up unusually late
listening to him, and it was near midnight before he and Lyddon went
to the old study for their usual smoke and talk. Richard’s enthusiasm
had by no means expended itself. “I know what you are thinking, Mr.
Lyddon,” he said, standing in his familiar argumentative attitude, his
back to the fireplace and his arms folded.
“Yes,” replied Lyddon, lighting his pipe. “Yesterday you performed a
great act. You sounded the death knell of slavery, you have emancipated
yourselves and your children forever from that curse.”
“So we may have done. The fathers of the Republic sought to emancipate
us and when we can act freely and without fear of Northern coercion we
shall perhaps follow the council of the patriarchs, but never under
threats, by God!” The two talked animatedly for a couple of hours.
Lyddon had feared that Richard, beguiled by the glamour of a soldier’s
life, would choose the army as a permanent career while in truth his
greater gifts lay in the domain of statecraft. But Lyddon’s mind was
relieved by Richard’s saying that he felt no inclination to adopt a
military life permanently.
Then as the case always was with Lyddon, their talk fell upon books.
Richard took down a battered volume and was reading aloud to Lyddon
what both knew by heart, the story of that Athenian night when Agatho
returned with the prize of Tragedy from the Olympian games and the
symposium was held at the house of Phædrus, and when the night was far
spent Alcibiades coming in with the tipsy crowd of Greek boys swore
that Socrates should drink two measures of wine to every other man’s
one; and Socrates, accepting this challenge, drank them all under
the table except Aristodemus, the old physician, and when day broke
Socrates after taking a bath went and taught philosophy in the groves
while the dew was still wet upon the grass.
As Lyddon and Richard Tremaine laughed over this old tale time went
backward. They forgot the storm and stress of to-day, the rise and
fall of empires, the fierce combat of body and soul in which the human
race had struggled for almost three thousand years since that Hellenic
night. Again they lived the life of those undying Greeks, and Richard,
who drew cleverly, was making a pen-and-ink sketch of the beautiful
tipsy Alcibiades when he suddenly laid down his pen and said after
listening for a moment, “There’s Neville. I hear a boat grating against
the wharf.”